MCAT Practice Exam Questions and Answers

Lateral Geniculate Nucleus - Visual Pathway Medial Geniculate Nucleus - Auditory Pathway Bipolar Cells - Relay sensory information relating to vision, olfaction, audition and the vestibular sense. Found in retina, inner ear, nasal cavity "miss" - failure to respond after an event has occurred Tunnel Vision - Decreased field of vision occurring after the sympathetic nervous system responds to "fight or flight" Top-Down Processing - Uses what the brain already knows and expects and fills in the blanks. Uses context Bottom Up Processing - Building of sensory info on top of each other for recognition Gestalt Processing - Seeing the whole of an object not just as an assembly of parts False Alarm - Responding yes when the response should be no or none Parvocellular Cells - Picture or object detection Magnocellular Cells - Motion detection Gate Theory of Pain - Pain signals are not free to reach the brain immediately; they encounter gates a the spinal cord level. Pain is felt when these gates or opened. Example of Gate Theory - Rubbing or messaging injured or painful area decreases pain response Ruffini Endings - Detect stretching of skin Free nerve endings - Pain detection Threshold theory of pain - signal for pain is not interpreted until it reaches a certain limit The auditory cortex is located in the _____ lobe. - Temporal The somatosensory cortex is located in the _______ lobe. - Parietal Structural Isomer - (Also called constitutional isomers) Same molecular formula but different connectivity. Configurational Isomers - Same connectivity but cannot be interconverted by rotating about a single bond. Need to break a single bond around single carbon atom Diastereomer - Same connectivity with at least one chiral center in common and at least one that is different How to know if a chiral carbon has d or l stereochem - positive optical rotation= d, negative= l Put in order of most stable to least stable: gauche, anti staggered, eclipsed - anti staggered, gauche, eclipsed Torsional Strain - Also eclipsing strain is the increase in potential energy of a molecule due to repulsion between electrons in bonds that do not share an atom (Eclipsed has high, or cis configuration) Elaborative Rehearsal - Thinking about the meaning of a word to be remembered as opposed to just repeating it over and over. Self- reference effect - Easier to remember something that is related to the individual, rather than one which is not Semantic Encoding - Encoding sensory input with context as opposed to just the word itself. Stronger than acoustic or visual encoding Spreading Activation - Recall of linked concepts. Like similar words in a list Shaping - Reinforcement mechanism where rewards are given for successive steps of a complex task, but in subsequent attempts earlier steps are no longer reinforced. Semantic Memory - Memory related to facts Episodic Memory - Memory related to events occurred in the person's life Source Amensia - Remembering a fact while forgetting the source Confabulation - Creation of a false narrative that one believes to be true, often associated with a disorder.